The King Without a Crown

King Without a Crown, The (1937)

*** (out of 4)

Another nice entry in MGM's "Historical Mysteries" series with Carey Wilson doing the narration and Tourneur behind the camera. This time out we hear the mystery surrounding the true identity of a preacher from Wisconsin who claimed to have been the lost Dauphin and perhaps should have been the King of France. The story goes back to Louis XVI and whether or not he died as a child or was snuck out of the prison he was in, taken to America and left there until he could go back to France and claim his crown. This series is one of my favorites and this here is yet another example of why the conspiracy theorist in me loves it so much. I hadn't really heard of the mystery here so I found the entire set up to be a rather interesting one. At the same time, I can't comment on how true the story was or where the truth actually lied. I will say that this short does a nice job at giving out the "evidence" surrounding this story and director Tourneur does a good job at bringing it to life. He made another film in this series, THE MAN IN THE BARN, about John Wilkes Booth, which is a lot better and certainly worth searching out but this too is good.

In this Carey Wilson short, he tells the tale of the Reign of Terror, Louis XIV's beheading, and the story of how the Dauphin was smuggled to America and raised by Indians. Fifty years later, a visiting French nobleman met him in Green Bay and tried to get him to sign an abdication, but he refused; not because he wanted to be King of France, but his infant son might some day.

It's the sort of short subject Wilson liked to sink his teeth into. He seemed fascinated by the French, and between writing BEN-HUR and Doctor Kildare movies, he produced and narrated four or five shorts about Nostradmus. I don't believe in Nostradamus' mystic abilities, and I believe that if some Minnesotan showed up in Paris, claiming he was the king of France and insist they eat lutefisk...... well, he wouldn't last long.

During the French Revolution, King Louis XVI and his wife were imprisoned and eventually executed. Their son, the future Louis XVII was held by the revolutionaries and soon disappeared...his whereabouts unknown to history. What we do know is that he never ruled and was likely murdered to prevent him ever assuming the French throne. But, surprisingly, over the years over a hundred different people came forth to announce that THEY were the missing Louis XVII! This MGM short is based on a claim by Eleazer Williams that he knew that the boy was spirited out of France to the United States was raised in modern day Wisconsin. Logically, the story made little sense that the boy was somehow raised by American Indians and escaped France to become a missionary among these indigenous people.

The story is ridiculous. However, MGM did make the film well and the costumes and sets are lovely. So, technically it's not a bad film even if the story seems like a lot of nonsense.